Bed at 2 a.m.
Till Total £22
4 Customers
WEDNESDAY, 4 FEBRUARY
Online orders: 4
Orders found: 3
Opened the shop, then went upstairs and made a cup of tea at 9.10. Came down the spiral stairs to discover Petra dancing around and singing. She gave me a big hug and told me to look after my chakras before dancing out of the door, singing.
Very few customers, but my favourite customer, Mr Deacon, appeared just after lunch – his lunch, not mine, the evidence of which had formed a Paisley-patterned series of stains down the front of his expensive-looking blue shirt. He asked if we had a biography of David Lloyd George. We didn’t. In fact, I sold the last one I had to Roy Hattersley, the retired Labour Party politician much lampooned by Spitting Image. He had required it for research into his widely respected biography of David Lloyd George, The Great Outsider, published in 2010. I clearly recall the telephone call in which he ordered the book – I knew instantly who it was and made a failed attempt to persuade him to come to Wigtown Book Festival by threatening not to send him the book unless he agreed to be one of our speakers. He never came.
Mr Deacon confided to me last year that he has dementia. Since then I have been worriedly observing him each time he comes to the shop, but so far he seems as usual: somewhat distracted, but a widely interested and voracious reader.
Till Total £47
5 Customers
THURSDAY, 5 FEBRUARY
Online orders: 0
Orders found: 0
After lunch a woman with the bearing of a retired headmistress brought in a box of books. They contained little of any interest, but I picked out two that I thought looked vaguely saleable: a scruffy copy of Songs of the Hebrides and an old school atlas. I offered her £10 for them, at which point she snatched them back and stormed off, saying, ‘I’ll just give them to the charity shop, in that case.’
Tomorrow I’ll go to the charity shop and buy them there for £5. There is a type of person who is convinced that everyone is determined to rip them off, and who obviously thinks that, by giving things they’ve been offered money for free to someone else, they will somehow be punishing the person who offered them the money. This is not how the world works.
I received a telephone call in the afternoon from a woman in the planning department telling me that someone has made a formal complaint about the concrete book spirals at the front of the shop. The spirals are two columns of books, arranged in a helix with an iron rod running through the centre of them, one on each side of the door into the shop. I used to make them from real books, coated in fibreglass resin, but they only lasted a couple of years before needing to be replaced, so I asked Norrie, a former employee, good friend and expert in all things concrete, if he could replace them with concrete ‘books’. Possibly the most repeated ‘joke’ of the many often repeated ‘jokes’ that customers subject me to is to point at one of the books at the bottom of the column and ask ‘Can I have that one?’
The woman from the planning department sounded apologetic and clearly had no personal objections to the spirals but had a process to follow, so she’s going to send me a retrospective planning application. She seemed quite positive that it would all go through fine, but that there would be costs attached.
Till Total £139
4 Customers
FRIDAY, 6 FEBRUARY
Online orders: 0
Orders found: 0
Nicky was working in the shop today, a clear, sunny day. She was ten minutes late, as usual, and slung her bag in the middle of the floor of the shop.
As it was Foodie Friday, she produced pakoras and some revolting-looking chocolate pastry thing that could honestly have been anything from an éclair to a body part.
A foreign couple came in just after Nicky. The woman asked, ‘So, this is a library?’
Me: No, it’s a bookshop.
Woman: So does that mean people can just borrow the books?
Me: No, the books are for sale.
Woman: Do you buy the books? Can people just come with a book and give it to you and take another one away?
[will to live seeping away rapidly]
Woman: Do you sell these old ones over here, or are they just for display?
We were low on change, so I went to the post office to get some. Normally Wilma, who works there, is quite happy to oblige on this front, but today must have been her day off and I was left to deal with miserable William, who flatly refused my request and told me, ‘We’re not a bloody bank.’
After lunch I drove to Ardwell House, near Stranraer (25 miles), with Anna, my American partner of the last five years, to look at books. The house belonged to a couple called Francis and Terry Brewis, both of whom died last year. Terry was the Lord Lieutenant of Wigtownshire. It’s a beautiful large house full of fine furniture and paintings, and with some interesting antiquarian books on the shelves, but sadly they weren’t the books they wanted to sell. We picked out about six boxes’ worth from the library and gave Chris, Francis’s brother (who has inherited the house), £300. He asked if we could take away some of the books we didn’t want, so that doubled our load. I will take them to Glasgow and dump them on Monday when I take Anna to the airport: she’s returning to the States for a while. Sadly, and through no fault of hers, our relationship hasn’t worked out, and despite her love of Wigtown and the area, and her many friends here, she feels a break from the place would be a useful thing for her.
The drive back, along the west coast of Luce Bay, with its mix of shingle beaches and sandy beaches, was stunning with the long shadows cast by the low winter sun. I could see Anna looking wistfully across the bay towards the Machars, the landscape she has inhabited for most of the past seven years.
Nicky stayed the night.
Till Total £83
4 Customers
SATURDAY, 7 FEBRUARY
Online orders: 2
Orders found: 2
Nicky opened the shop, so I had a lie in until 9.30. When I came downstairs, she had the remains of Foodie Friday’s haul on a plate on the counter, and said ‘Is there any better breakfast than leftover chocolate bomb, pakora and beer?’
I emailed Flo to see if she could cover the shop on Monday morning so that I can drive Anna to Glasgow airport. She assured me that she could, so at least that’s sorted. Flo worked in the shop last summer. She’s a student at Edinburgh University, and when she’s home she’s usually happy to help out in the shop if required.
After lunch I went with Anna to Galloway House gardens (an eighteenth-century arboretum about six miles away which leads down to a beach), so that she could enjoy her favourite things in the area before she leaves on Monday. There was a dusting of snow on the ground and the snowdrop flowers were hanging over it, with the wild garlic poking through in patches. Anna is particularly fond of this garden. It was one of the first places we went together when she came here from LA seven years ago. I think the juxtaposition of a beautiful garden and a stunning beach appeals to her filmic imagination. She is a film-maker by trade, and whenever we’re here, I can see her face change, and I know that in her head she’s directing a period drama set in this place.
Email from Anna Dreda reminding me that her Readers’ Group is coming up next Sunday. I’ve offered them the use of the shop and the big room for the week, as February is so quiet it might as well be used. Anna has a bookshop in Much Wenlock in Shropshire, and stayed with me last year with her partner, Hilary, on their way home from a holiday in the Western Isles.
Till Total £349.48
15 Customers
SUNDAY, 8 FEBRUARY
Online orders: Orders found:
Today was Anna’s last day before returning to America, so we went to visit Jessie, who runs the Picture Shop in Wigtown. She has been in hospital for about three weeks, and looked quite frail. We – perhaps optimistically – decided it was her medication rather than failing health that was the cause. Afterwards we returned to the arboret
um at Galloway House ‘one final time’, where the rhododendron buds are fattening up, ready to flower, then along the deserted beach at Rigg Bay. Home at five o’clock in the thickening winter twilight.
Despite the cultural chasm between rural Scotland and suburban Massachusetts, Anna dropped into life in Wigtown as though she’d been born to it. She has befriended everyone, and her relentless good nature has endeared her to the place and its people. One of her favourite characters is Vincent, who owns the petrol station in town. When she first moved here, she realised that she was going to need a car, so Vincent – famous for his fleet of wrecks – found her a Vauxhall Nova which she adored, and happily drove around in – initially, nervously and painfully slowly (with her face close to the windscreen and her body visibly tense) but latterly at considerable speed and with wild abandon, once she’d grown used to driving on the left. On one occasion she decided to go to the auction in Dumfries on her own (I must have been busy with something) and was almost at the saleroom when she heard a loud metallic noise like an explosion. In panic, she instinctively pulled over to the right, rather than the left, into what could easily have been oncoming traffic. When she got out of the car, she spotted almost the entire exhaust in the middle of the road. She never made it to the auction, but Vincent kindly arranged for her to be picked up by a Dumfries mechanic who repaired the car so that she could drive back to Wigtown.
MONDAY, 9 FEBRUARY
Online orders: 7
Orders found: 6
Up at 7 a.m. to take Anna to Glasgow airport. It was dark, and the wind and rain beat against the van all the way. We bade each other a very tearful farewell. There has been a tension between us for some time, caused entirely by me and a fear of commitment that I don’t entirely understand, so we’ve decided to spend some time apart.
I fear that this may be not just the end of a chapter but the closing of the book for Anna and me. When she first moved here, things seemed perfect: an intelligent, funny, attractive woman who wanted to live in Wigtown and have a life with me. The problem is me, though. I find it hard to see a future except as a cantankerous curmudgeon, living alone. It’s not a future that I – or anyone, I suspect – would wish for, but there it is, and to my shame it has caused hurt to Anna and to my family, who embraced her as a daughter and sister.
On the way home I dropped a van-load of rotated stock off at the recycling plant. The man who I have to deal with there seems to become more irate every time I visit. Today he was cursing and swearing about having to find me three large plastic tubs into which to deposit the books for recycling. Returned home at 1.30 p.m. to find the shop locked and a message taped to the door from Flo explaining that she had forgotten that she didn’t have a key, and consequently had been unable to open the shop, so I opened up and checked the mail. It included the planning application for the concrete spirals, with a demand for £401 to cover the cost of the application. I called Adrian Paterson, a local architect, and asked him if he could deal with the application, since it required scale drawings done to an architectural standard.
At three o’clock an elderly couple came in, the woman clutching a plastic bag to her breast like a feeding infant. Inside, bubble-wrapped, was a copy of Livingstone’s Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa (Ward Lock, 1857). She had inherited it from her mother, and they’d been ‘watching one of them antiques programmes and someone brought a copy on and it was worth £10,000’. This is not a scarce book, and when I told them that, and that their copy was only worth about £50, they both looked at me with undisguised contempt, as if I was either a charlatan or a fool. I suspect the copy they saw on television was inscribed by Livingstone. I can’t imagine any other reason for it being so highly valued. Books of this period frequently have, as a frontispiece, a portrait of the author, and this is often accompanied underneath by a facsimile of their signature. I’ve lost count of the number of times customers have tried to sell me ‘signed’ copies of books that are clearly reproductions of the author’s signature.
Bum-Bag Dave called in at 4.55 p.m. He often arrives at inconvenient times. So often, in fact, that I wonder if he makes a point of timing his visits to cause maximum disruption. As always, he was laden with bum-bags and various other forms of luggage. He redeemed himself by buying a book about Fokker aircraft of the First World War. When he opened the door to leave, Captain shot into the room at high speed, leaving Dave looking satisfyingly startled.
Till Total £67.49
6 Customers
TUESDAY, 10 FEBRUARY
Online orders: 3
Orders found: 2
At 10 a.m. I lit the fire in the drawing room above the shop for the old ladies’ art class. They meet here every Tuesday during the winter, and paint en plein air during the summer.
After lunch I drove to Kirkpatrick Durham, a pretty village about ten miles from Dumfries, to look at some books that a woman had called me about last week. They had belonged to her late husband. The house was a whitewashed cottage at the end of a farm road, and the books were a collection of A. G. Street hardbacks in dust jackets. The woman selling the books seemed reluctant to part with them, as they were clearly her husband’s favourite books. He had grown up on a farm in Sussex, she had spent her life in Birmingham, and they’d met on a trip to St Kilda in their fifties. Sadly, he died of cancer two years ago.
A. G. Street was a Wiltshire farmer who wrote about agriculture during the 1930s, and whose works were immensely popular in their time but, like many others, have fallen into relative obscurity. We’re still occasionally asked for his books, but the frequency of these requests is decreasing like the intervals of breath of a dying animal. Kirkpatrick Durham too is an interesting place, if for nothing more than the achievement of its most famous son, Kirkpatrick Macmillan. Born there in 1812, Macmillan is credited with inventing the bicycle, an achievement for which he was widely recognised during his lifetime, but for which he took little credit or acclaim, refusing even to patent the invention.
The books weren’t in great condition, but I gave her £40 for two boxes and headed home.
My mother dropped in at four o’clock to tell me that Jessie from The Picture Shop died this morning. The gravity of the moment was lightened slightly when my mother decided to tell Elaine, one of the art class (very deaf, and an old friend of my mother), about Jessie’s sad demise. I’m not quite sure how, but Elaine misunderstood completely and thought that Jessie was retiring and that Anna was taking over her shop. On hearing what she thought were glad tidings, she announced, ‘Oh, that is such wonderful news’.
Just before closing, a man wearing a flamboyant paisley bow tie brought in six boxes of books, mainly hardbacks in excellent condition, with the focus on art and gardening. I told him that I’d go through them and work out a price by tomorrow lunchtime.
Till Total £67.50
4 Customers
WEDNESDAY, 11 FEBRUARY
Online orders: 5
Orders found: 2
At 11 a.m. a tall, thin man with diabolical halitosis appeared at the counter and said, ‘Hello Shaun, we’ve met before. I’ve got some books to sell’. He then deposited a box of books about cinema on the counter and wandered off, so I went through them and picked out a few. When he returned, I offered him £12 for eight books, at which point he produced a list and started checking each one against it, saying, ‘That one’s selling for £6 on Amazon, how much are you giving me for that one?’ I attempted to explain that, although it might be £6 on Amazon, I would probably be lucky to get £4 for it. I might as well have been explaining particle physics to a chimpanzee. Eventually he left with all the books he’d come in with and a bewildered look on his face. I still have no idea who he was, or where we had previously met.
Among his books, though, was a copy of This Thing of Darkness, by Harry Thompson. It’s a truly excellent book. A friend gave me a copy about eight years ago. Shortly after I’d finished reading it, and during the Wigtown Book Festival, a visiting author asked
me if I had anything in stock about Fitzroy and the Beagle (the very subject of This Thing of Darkness). I had a look in the relevant sections but we had nothing, so I went upstairs to the Writers’ Retreat to let him know. I found him chatting to Fiona Duff, the person who was in charge of the PR and marketing for the festival that year. I waited for a suitable gap in the conversation and told him that we didn’t have anything in stock, but that I could strongly recommend This Thing of Darkness, at which point Fiona piped up ‘Oh, my husband wrote that’. My relief that I’d said I had enjoyed it was swiftly followed by Fiona embarking on a scything and detailed description of the end of their relationship.
Very quiet day, even for the time of year, but a huge sense of optimism restored by noticing that – even half an hour after closing the shop – there was still a vestige of daylight in the darkening sky. It’s almost worth the miserable, sinking sense of despair of December to experience the exhilarating elation of emerging from the depths of darkness as February marches on. I remember a few years ago talking with my sister Lulu, who had recently been travelling, about her time in Ecuador, or Peru, or possibly northern Chile. I asked her how she’d enjoyed being there, and contrary to my expectations, she told me that what she had found hardest about being there in summer was the shortness of the days, being so close to the equator. She had longed for the stretching Scottish summer evenings, when the sun sets at 10 p.m. in June, rather than soon after 6 p.m. for most of the year in those countries. Even when I reminded her of the four o’clock December sunsets in Scotland, she assured me that – for her – it was worth it for the pay-off of the endless evenings in the summer.
Till Total £28.49
3 Customers
THURSDAY, 12 FEBRUARY 2015
Confessions of a Bookseller Page 4